Here I Go Again On My Own, Looking Down the Only Road I've Ever Known…

Now that you have images of Tawny Kitaen writhing on the hood of a car…

Here I go again, trying to figure out a way to pull all the random threads of my life together into one semi-coherent whole. So we’re going through this Forty Days of Purpose campaign at church. And it dovetails so nicely with where my inner child work has been leading me. Not to mention my enneagram/constructive living work. Even the Flylady housecleaning stuff. Can, like, six different things “dovetail” together all at once? I think in that case, it’s less a dovetail joint than one of those quilt-patterns, where all the little diamonds come together to a point to make a spiffy little multicolored calico star.

So what is that magic point? That intersection of the fabric and thread, the warp and weft of my life, that everything else points to? It has to be God. When I look over my life, there He is, smack dab in the center of all of it. Pulling me to Him. And I think I am pretty grounded in that knowledge. I need to make time to keep myself that way, though. To set aside some time to just soak myself in His presence and love till my fingers and toes get pruny.

But at a certain point, you have to start working out from that center, and deciding which little diamond goes where. How many you can squeeze into the inner circle, and what has to get bumped to the next row. Wow, what a lovely metaphor. Better yet, a metaphor I could draw into a diagram to help me with this. If I drew one of those starburst quilts, what would I put in the first ring of diamonds? The second ring? What goes on the outside? And what does each row represent? Maybe the stuff on the inner circle are the things that get my CONSISTENT, DAILY attention. Second row is stuff that needs to be dealt with at least weekly. Yada, yada, yada.

Another little chicken nugget o’ wisdom that came my way today is this. I suck at routine and order. Chaos and serendipity are my native programming language. This is not exactly a newsflash (particularly to those who know me.) I’ve also sort of been pondering the Truth for a few months that both are required for a healthy life. Freedom and creativity without boundaries and order becomes unproductive chaos and disorder. It accomplishes nothing in reality. Order and structure without imagination and passion are dead. It gets much done but misses the point of all of it. Okay, these are also concepts that I’ve accepted for quite a while now.

Here’s the little nugget that’s new: life on purpose is a life where you’re not on autopilot. You’re not sleepwalking. It’s a life lived intentionally. Now, when I read all that, I thought “I’m way ahead of the game. Sleepwalkers and people on autopilot are people who are stuck in routine. Obsessive compulsives and anal retentives.”

The little knock-you-outta-your-seat moment I had today is that being nonlinear and chaotic out of habit, or “because that’s the way I’m wired” or whatever is stillsleepwalking and living on autopilot. Intentionally working to have more order and routine, and building a “structure” around which I can wrap my creativity, is what equals “waking up and living my life on purpose” for me.

I know, I know. For some people, that’s not an AHA moment. That’s a DUH moment. But that’s me.